Fifteen Questions to Ask Before Hiring an AEO Agency

About measurement

1. How do you measure AI visibility, and can I see a sample report? The answer should involve a fixed set of queries, run across several engines on a schedule, scored for presence, position, and how you are described. If the sample report is a list of keyword rankings, that is SEO with a new label.

2. How do you build the query set? From real buyer questions, ideally validated against sales calls, support tickets, and the questions people actually ask engines. Not from a keyword tool alone.

3. How often do you report, and what changes week to week? Weekly is reasonable. The honest answer includes a warning that single weeks are noisy and the trend over a quarter is what matters.

4. What do you do when a number goes down? You want to hear "look at which sources the engine switched to and why." You do not want to hear "the algorithm changed."

About method

5. What is the first thing you do on a new engagement? An audit of what the engines currently say, which sources they cite, and where the technical layer is broken. Anything that starts with content production before that audit is guessing.

6. How do you decide which pages to write or rewrite? From the gaps the audit found: queries where you are absent, facts the engines get wrong, sources that cite competitors but not you.

7. What does the technical work include? Crawler access per user agent, JavaScript dependence, schema markup, llms.txt, and entity consistency across your site and third-party profiles. If any of those is missing, ask why.

8. How do you get into Reddit, review sites, YouTube, and lists? The answer should be some version of earning it: participating honestly, getting listed where you belong, making sure the facts match. If the answer involves buying placements or seeding reviews, walk away.

9. Do you buy placements or post reviews on our behalf? The only acceptable answer is no.

About understanding

10. Explain the difference between what a model remembers and what it retrieves. A competent agency can do this in two minutes and tell you which one their work affects.

11. Which engines do you track and why those? Expect ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google's AI surfaces, Claude, and Copilot at minimum, with a reason tied to where your buyers are.

12. What has changed in engine behavior in the last six months? You are testing whether they watch. The specifics matter less than whether they have any.

About the relationship

13. What do you need from us? Access to the site, a source of truth for company facts, and someone who can approve content and participate in communities. If they need nothing from you, they are not planning to do much.

14. What will you not promise? Guaranteed placement, a specific share of answer by a date, or control over what a model says. Any agency promising those is promising things it cannot deliver.

15. What is in the free tier, and can we start there? Many agencies offer diagnostic tools or a light audit. Use them. They show you how the agency thinks before you pay for it.

Our answers

At AEO GEO Labs the engagement starts with an audit that records what each engine says about you, which sources it cites, and where the technical layer fails. Share of answer is measured weekly against a query set built from real buyer questions. The work is pages written to be quoted, the schema and llms.txt and entity consistency pass, and getting into the sources the engines already trust. No paid placements. No fake reviews. The free tools, from the ai-crawler-checker to the schema generator, are the same checks we run internally, published so you can run them first.

Use the list

Send these fifteen questions to any agency you are considering, including us, and compare the answers side by side. The agencies that answer specifically and admit what they cannot control are the ones doing the work. If you want to start with the free checks before any conversation, AEO GEO Labs has them on the site, and the audit is the natural next step when you want the full picture.